LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE >> Louise Jandura has come a long way from scattering Lego blocks on the floor with her sister. Now she builds things a little less colorful, but far more high-tech.

Jandura, 51, is the chief engineer of the Mars Curiosity rover’s sampling system at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which includes its robotic arm and drill.

“(Playing with Lego blocks) allowed that to be a possibility,” Jandura said. “I really like math and science. I like to enhance, take things apart, and then rebuild them. Having the ability to build and reconfigure with something like Legos really helped reinforce some of the possibilities.”

Today, JPL engineers sometimes play with Lego blocks at work to spur ingenuity and creativity when working on a spacecraft or its mission. The multi-colored blocks as well as other brainstorming toys are strewn about the laboratory’s mechanical design center, where spacecrafts like the Curiosity rover was designed.

“We use them for creativity,” said Jordan Evans, 43, deputy flight system manager of the Mars Curiosity rover. “When we started getting concerned about wind and sample drop-off, we started playing with Legos and tinker toys. I would imagine most JPL-ers played with Legos, and some of us still do at work when we’re trying to get creative.”

Evans decided he wanted to be an aerospace engineer when he was in third grade, when the Apollo program was coming to an end, and while he was playing with Lego blocks.

“They are an opportunity for kids to build something that didn’t exist an hour ago, in three dimensions,” Evans said.

Education and nostalgia, as well as advancements like play sets, theme parks, resorts, video games and TV shows, keep the Lego brand from crumbling. And to prove its resiliency, Warner Bros. released the first full-length theatrical Lego movie this weekend, a $60 million-budgeted animated family comedy directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and “21 Jump Street”) and featuring the voices of Chris Pratt, Will Ferrell, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Liam Neeson and Morgan Freeman.

“They’re really cool toys,” Lord said. “One of the reasons is they’re a left-brain toy and a right-brain toy at the same time. They engage the creative side and the engineering side and that’s kind of one of the things that inspired us to make this movie.”

Since 1958, Lego building blocks have given youngsters an opportunity to build rockets and pirate ships — and whether they realize it or not, potentially build toward a job making Hollywood blockbusters, or pioneering space technology for NASA.

“From a social and emotional standpoint, their whole world is play, and they don’t know their learning,” said Trisha McDonell, spokeswoman for Lego Education. “It just helps with those cognitive skills and be able to help through the learning process.”

Founded in 1980, Lego Education was designed after the Lego company got wind that many teachers across the country were using the toys in their classrooms. The Lego Education website provides an extensive list of case studies presenting the educational benefits from preschool to college.

“When (students) go into the classroom, it can be intimidating,” McDonell said. “They play with Lego at home, and then engage with it in class because they’re comfortable. When they don’t realize they’re learning, they actually learn more.”

Lego was established in 1934 as a manufacturer of stepladders, ironing board tools and wooden toys. The Lego bricks that kids know and play with today didn’t come about until years later, playing on the fact that Lego is Latin for “I put together.”

“If you envision what a car might be and then you do it, there’s just a lot of pieces that fit together and you can make it a reality,” said Jandura. “The fact that you can go from concept to realization in a short period of time really stimulates that creative process.”

In 2004, Lego A/S, based in Billund, Denmark, experienced its third annual loss in five years, resulting in layoffs and limiting product lines, Blooming reported. The company rebounded in 2012 by climbing 25 percent to $4.04 billion last year, surpassing Mattel as the most profitable toy manufacturer, Bloomberg reported.

Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the CEO of Lego from 1979 to 2004, is the richest person in Denmark with a net worth of about $7.3 billion, according to Forbes.

To help build the brand back up, Lego began reaching out by creating new properties for a new generation of budding engineers, like the Cartoon Network show “Legends of Chima,” as well as Lego-izing popular brands like “Lord of the Rings,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Harry Potter” and “Batman”, and turning them into hit video games.

Lego Education is also still making new programs for kids. Just last year, StoryStarter was announced to allow kids to “build” their stories with Lego blocks before writing it.

“We actually found that the children who were struggling writing a story, rather expository or personal, building the story beforehand impacted the story before they write,” McDonell said.

Now comes “The Lego Movie,” which has received rave reviews. Pratt voices Emmet, an ordinary Lego minifigure mistaken as a master builder, who is predicted to save the Lego universe from being super-glued together by Lord Business (Ferrell). Emmet is assisted by Wyldstyle (Banks), a wizard named Vitruvius (Freeman), as well as Lego versions of Batman (Arnett), Wonder Woman (Cobie Smulders), Superman (Channing Tatum) and Green Lantern (Jonah Hill).

The cast of the film has a history making things with Legos. Pratt “liked to make swords and whack people with them,” he said.

Banks’ earliest memory was grabbing the Legos from her sisters and playing with them. But now that she has children of her own, she shares a bit more.

“I have two young sons, so now I’ve journeyed back,” Banks said. “I’ll spend time with my sons on the floor. I’ll build something that I think is cool, then I’ll present it to my kids and they’ll immediately smash it.”

Freeman remembers the bricks being stepping hazards as his children left them around his apartment when his children were younger.

“I don’t have any creativity around Lego, and so neither did my kids,” he said.

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